Iconography and Identity: Syrian Elements in the Art of Crusader Cyprus
Annemarie Weyl Carr
Abstract The murals of triumphal arch in the Church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus, painted in the late thirteenth century when Cyprus was a Crusader state, adopt an iconography paralleled not in Byzantium but in the Miaphysite churches of the Syrian and Egyptian mainland, and best analyzed in relation to Miaphysite liturgical exegesis. As such, they suggest three revisions to current ways of thinking about the roles of Cyprus and the mainland in shaping the art of the Crusader era: ) rather than for a ‘maniera cypria’ or a ‘maniera tripolitana’, we must look for an intricate, two-way reciprocity; ) it is a reciprocity not simply between Cyprus and the mainland Crusader states, but between Cyprus and the far larger terrain of Syrian and Egyptian eastern Christendom; and ) it engages not only style but also iconography and content.
Keywords Iconography; identity; Crusader Cyprus.
This article addresses the relation of artistic developments on the Syrian main- land to those on the island of Cyprus during the thirteenth century.1 Cyprus lies, at closest point, just miles off the coast of the Syro-Palestinian main- land, and though those miles were as much a buffer as a bridge, there can have been few periods when the two areas were artistically independent of each other. Their relationship in the thirteenth century has assumed espe- cially vivid interest for historians because of its role in what we call ‘Crusader
1) This article is based on a paper read on December in the conference entitled ‘Religious Origins of Nations?’ to which this volume is dedicated. I owe warm thanks to Professor Bas ter Haar Romeny for the opportunity to participate in the conference. The paper builds further upon research done for a monograph on Asinou to be published by Har- vard University Press under the sponsorship of Dumbarton Oaks, and I express my gratitude to Dumbarton Oaks and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for supporting that research. Annemarie Weyl Carr art’.2 The areas affected by the crusader implantation saw a period of vigorous artistic productivity in the thirteenth century, still registered in the rich roster of frescoed churches and portable objects, especially panel painted icons, that survive on both Cyprus itself and the mainland. On Cyprus the thirteenth- century monuments published already in the s and ’s by Athanasios Papageorgiou,3 Doula Mouriki,4 and Andreas and Judith Stylianou,5 have been augmented since with newly published icons, ceramic ware, and archaeological sites.6 On the mainland, in turn, the great trove of icons at the Monastery of St Catherine, Mount Sinai, is especially rich in panels from the thirteenth— particularly the late thirteenth—century.7 The dedicated work of Erica Cruik- shank Dodd, Nada Hélou, Lucy-Anne Hunt, Mat Immerzeel, Karel Innemée, Lévon Nordiguian, Andrea Schmidt, and Stefan Westphalen, in turn, has expanded dramatically both the number of published Syrian wall paintings, and the range of our knowledge about them.8
2) On the complexities of this term, and the vast inventory of artifacts subsumed under it, see Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, – (New York, ), pp. – and passim. 3) Athanasios Papageorgiou, ‘L’art byzantin de Chypre et l’art des Croisés. Influences réci- proques’, in Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus (Nicosia, ), pp. –; Athanasios Papageorgiou, ‘ Ιδι υσα υαντινα τιγρααι τ υ ανς ν Κπρ ω’, in T. Papadopoullos (ed.), Πρακτικ τ πρ τ υ διεν ς κυπρ λ γικ συνεδρ υ (Λευ- κωσα, – Απριλ υ ), Τ μ ς Β’: Μεσαιωνικ τμ μα (Nicosia, ), pp. –. 4) See above all Doula Mouriki, ‘Thirteenth-Century Icon Painting in Cyprus’, The Griffon NS – (–), pp. –; Doula Mouriki, ‘The Wall Paintings of the Church of the Panagia at Moutoullas, Cyprus’, in I. Hutter (ed.), Byzanz und der Westen (Vienna, ), pp. –. 5) Andreas Stylianou and Judith A. Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus. Treasures of Byzantine Art (nd ed.; Nicosia, ), initially published in under the same title. 6) See Annemarie Weyl Carr, ‘Art’, in Angel Nikolaou-Konnari and Christopher Schabel (eds.), Cyprus. Society and Culture – (Leiden, ), pp. –. 7) For the panels of the thirteenth century, see especially Kurt Weitzmann, ‘Icon Painting in the Crusader Kingdom’, DOP (), pp. –, and Kurt Weitzmann, ‘Thirteenth- Century Crusader Icons on Mount Sinai’, ABull (), pp. –, both reprinted in Kurt Weitzmann, Studies in the Arts at Sinai (Princeton, ), articles , ; Doula Mouriki, ‘Icons from the th to the th Century’, in Konstantinos A. Manafis (ed.), Sinai. Treasures of the Monastery (Athens, ), pp. –; Helen C. Evans (ed.), Byzantium. Faith and Power (–). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March –July , (Exhibition Catalogue; New York, ), pp. –. 8) See in particular Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Medieval Painting in the Lebanon (Wiesbaden, ); Erica Cruikshank Dodd, The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi (Toronto, ); Nada Hélou, ‘L’icône bilatérale de la Vierge de Kaftoun au Liban: une oeuvre d’art syro- byzantin à l’époque des croisés’, Chronos (), pp. –; Lucy-Anne Hunt, ‘The